Reducing Involuntary Subscriber Churn

After acquiring new customers for your subscription service, you can minimize subscriber loss, known as churn, by keeping them engaged as active subscribers. However, irregular billing events can occur throughout the lifecycle of a subscription that can impact your customer's subscription status.

Involuntary churn occurs when users do not intend to leave your service but their subscription fails to renew, usually due to billing issues. Because involuntary churn is not related to customer satisfaction, consider creating a user experience that avoids subscriber loss due to a failed renewal. For business guidance on retaining subscribers, see Keeping Subscribers.

Billing-related issues trigger a subscription to automatically enter a billing retry state, where the App Store attempts to recover the subscription. While the App Store tries to recover these customers, you have the option to prompt users to update their billing information or implement a grace period, or both, to assist in recovery efforts. Enabling a grace period and providing uninterrupted service provides a great customer experience, and avoids interrupting your days of paid service and revenue loss if Apple is able to recover the subscription within the grace period. For information on auto-renewable subscription proceeds and days of paid service, see Net Revenue After a Year.

If the customer's billing is invalid, the renewal fails and the user's subscription enters a billing retry state, where the App Store attempts to collect payment for up to 60 days. This billing retry lowers the rate of involuntary churn and prevents the need to re-acquire subscribers if they churned. If the user is recovered within the 60 days, the new billing date is established on the date of recovery and subsequent renewal dates are based on this new billing date, as shown in the figure below.

For example, if the user’s payment information is no longer valid, the first renewal attempt fails. If you have server-to-server notifications enabled, you receive a server notification of type DID_FAIL_TO_RENEW. You can check the expiration_intent and is_in_billing_retry_period values in the verifyReceipt response or unified_receipt object in the server notification to validate the reason for the subscription to lapse and monitor the retry status of the subscription. If the user is recovered during this period, you receive a server notification of types RENEWAL and DID_RECOVER when the retry is successful. For more information on server-to-server notifications, see App Store Server Notifications.

Your app may optionally present in-app messaging that informs users they can avoid losing access to paid service by taking action and resolving their billing error. If you choose to prompt the user, ensure your app's subscription logic can handle different values of expiration_intent along with expires_date_ms, to show the appropriate message. An invalid payment method could be due to a number of things, such as a low balance on a stored value card or an expired credit card. Your app should be ready to react immediately to a billing information update. Your app can deep link customers to the Manage Payments page on their account settings by opening this URL:

https://apps.apple.com/account/billing

For more general guidance on handling subscriptions that enter a billing retry state, see WWDC 2018 > Engineering Subscriptions. You can also agree to provide a grace period for subscribers in a billing retry state. Billing error recoveries made within the set grace period automatically recover subscribers onto their current billing cycle, also providing revenue continuity.

To avoid interrupting days of paid service, you can enable Billing Grace Period in App Store Connect, which allows subscribers to retain full access to your app’s paid content while Apple attempts to collect payment. For guidance on opting in to enable Billing Grace Period for your app, see Enable Billing Grace Period for Auto-Renewable Subscriptions.

Billing Grace Period is applied at the time of a billing error when it's enabled for subscriptions in the app, and cannot be altered once assigned to a user. Grace period durations are dependent on the subscription period length as follows:

• 6 days for a weekly subscription

• 16 days for monthly and longer subscriptions

If you choose to enable Billing Grace Period, ensure that you provide full service for the subscription throughout the grace period. You can check the grace_period_expires_date_ms field in the responseBody.Pending_renewal_info array of the verifyReceipt response or unified_receipt object in the server notification to determine the end of this grace period duration. For more information on reducing involuntary churn using a grace period, see WWDC 2019 > In-App Purchases and Using Server-to-Server Notifications.

If the user is recovered within this grace period, neither the subscriber's days of paid service, nor your revenue for auto-renewable subscriptions will be interrupted. Billing error recoveries made after the grace period expires, but within the overall billing retry period, will maintain existing behavior and renew on the recovery date, starting a new billing cycle. Payment for the provided full service during the grace period would not be collected.

When implementing Billing Grace Period, use the verifyReceipt JSON response and server-to-server notifications. Consider using expiration_intent, is_in_billing_retry_period, and grace_period_expires_date_ms of the unified_receipt object in the server notifications of type RENEWAL and DID_RECOVER to identify whether the subscription is in a grace period.

The expiration_intent value can tell you if a subscription renewal failed due to a billing error, or simply because the user chose to cancel service. You can also see if the App Store is actively trying to recover a subscription by looking for an active is_in_billing_retry_period flag.

Consider all scenarios for subscription recovery:

• If the subscription renews before the time specified in grace_period_expires_date_ms, the grace_period_expires_date fields are removed along with the is_in_billing_retry_period indicator. You can look up a past transaction’s purchase_date_ms and expires_date_ms values to determine if a user’s subscription renewed after a lapse.

• If the subscription renews after the time specified in grace_period_expires_date_ms while still in the billing retry state, the grace_period_expires_date fields are removed along with the is_in_billing_retry_period indicator. You can use the expires_date_ms value for a past transaction to determine the lapse period.

• If attempts to renew the subscription fail, the grace_period_expires_date fields persist along with a value of 0 for the auto_renew_status and is_in_billing_retry_period indicators.

When users update their payment information, the App Store immediately attempts to renew the payment. Once the App Store successfully bills the customer in a billing retry state, the App Store notifies your server with notifications of types RENEWAL and DID_RECOVER, and a new receipt is generated for the successful transaction. A new value appears in the expires_date_ms field in the app transaction receipt, based on the date of recovery, to mark the next renewal date of the subscription.

StoreKit adds a new transaction for the renewal to the transaction queue on the device. Your app can check the transaction queue on launch and handle the renewal the same way as any other transaction. If your app is already running when the subscription renews, the transaction observer is not called; your app finds out about the renewal the next time the app launches. Restore service once the subscription is renewed if needed.